Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

These (four-wheeled) wagons were very slow – 3.2 kph, on one estimate. The (two-wheeled) chariot, however, was a good bit faster – 12–14 kph when trotting, 17–20 kph when galloping. In the cuneiform texts, Sumerian refers to the ‘equid of the desert’, meaning an ass or donkey, and to the ‘equid of the mountains’, meaning horse.⁸⁵ Three words were used for wheeled vehicles: mar-gid-da, for four-wheeled wagons, gigir, for two-wheeled vehicles, and narkabtu which, as time went by, came to mean chariot. With narkabtu, says archaeologist Stuart Piggott, ‘We come to the beginning of one of the great chapters of ancient history: the development of the light two-wheeled chariot drawn by paired horses as a piece of technology and as an institution within the social order as an emblem of power and prestige.’⁸⁶ After the first solid wheels were invented, the spoked wheel was conceived. This had to be built under tension, with shaped wood, but its lightness made much greater speeds possible.⁸⁷ Chariot warfare flourished between 1700 and 1200 BC – i.e., at the end of the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age.

A word about the equid of the mountains. It is fair to say that, just now, no one knows exactly where or when the horse was domesticated and when or where the idea of riding was conceived. Until recently, it was assumed that settlement of the Eurasian steppe depended on the domestication of the horse, and that the steppe pioneers were ‘pastoral horsemen of warlike disposition’. Among archaeologists, the earliest example of horse domestication was for many years attributed to Dereivka, 300 kilometres north of the Black Sea, and now in Ukraine, and which formed part of the Sredny Stog culture – i.e., much the same location as where the wheel may have been invented. This site, dated to between 4570 and 3098 BC, is located on the right bank of the river Omelnik, a tributary of the Dnepr. The evidence for this interpretation came from the presence of horse bones in human burials, the remains of pre-molar teeth apparently worn down by bits, perforated antler tines interpreted as cheek pieces, and the preponderance of male horse bones at ancient sites, suggesting that they were preferred in a traction and riding context. There is also the indirect evidence of the emergence of horse-headed sceptres, made of bone, which indicate a horse cult, if not, strictly speaking, riding.⁸⁸

Reanalysis of the material in the past few years has by and large vitiated these conclusions. The so-called cheek pieces have never been found in place on a horse’s skull and are only rarely associated with horse remains at all. The wear of the pre-molars on wild horses turns out to be no different from that on so-called domesticated animals, and the profile of bones found at ancient sites, both inside and outside tombs, is no different from wild populations (which are known to exist, for example, in ‘bachelor groups’). We now know that the only area where changes in bone structure are incontrovertibly brought about by domestication, in this case by riding, is to the mid-backbone of a horse, where the rider would sit. Vertebrae of ancient horses that undoubtedly were ridden characteristically show minute stress lesions (cracks) on their epiphyses, the outer harder parts. Such lesions are completely absent in wild horses. So far, these lesions on ancient horses have been traced back no earlier than the fifth century BC.⁸⁹ The earliest unambiguous dateable textual and artistic evidence for horse domestication goes back to the end of the third millennium BC. Evidence of horse graves, accompanied by artefacts unambiguously associated with riding or traction, is even more recent, dating to probably no later than the end of the second millennium BC, when horses were widely used to pull chariots in both the Near East, the Eurasian steppe and in Greece. There is thus no reliable textual or artistic evidence for horse-riding earlier than the end of the second millennium BC.⁹⁰

The Latin poet Ovid was just one author in antiquity who was convinced there had once been a primeval golden age, free of aggression and rancour: ‘With no one to impose punishment, without any laws, men kept faith and did what was right . . . The people passed their lives in security and peace, without need for armies.’⁹¹